SARASOTA, FLA.- The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art announced the exhibition In the Flesh: The Nude in Modern Japan, on view from February 21 to August 23, in the recently dedicated Charles and Robyn Citrin Gallery, named after long-time generous museum patrons. Spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s, the exhibition features prints and a magnificent painting by Ishikawa Toraji, exploring how Japanese artists reimagined the nude over the twentieth century.

“This group of artworks, drawn principally from the superb Citrin Collection, highlights the ebb and flow of ideas between Japan and the West, and suggests how Japanese artists engaged with Western themes and gave them new meaning,” says Dr. Rhiannon Paget, The Ringling’s Curator of Asian Art.

Almost all of the works are images of women, reflecting the conventions of the genre, as well as the preferences of male artists and their audience. The assimilation of the modern nude into the Japanese canon is distinct in Japan, where, historically, representations of nudity had been largely limited to pornographic prints that flourished during the Edo period (1615–1868). However, in modern Japan, the artistic merit of the nude gained respectability and entered the repertoire of Western- and Japanese-style painting, printmaking, sculpture, and beyond.

In the exhibition’s singular painting, Before the Mirror (1935), by Ishikawa Toraji, the subject’s bobbed hairstyle, the fashionably bohemian interior she inhabits, and her cool, self- appraising gaze mark her as a “modern girl,” or moga—Japan’s version of the flapper in the 1920s and 1930s.

Shin hanga (New Prints) artists of the 1920s–30s, almost exclusively male, drew from the themes and sensibilities of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century ukiyo-e, catering largely to Western audiences. While artists like Torii Kotondo created serene images of demure young women, Ishikawa Toraji’s racy paintings and prints of confident “modern girls” tested the limits of decorum. In the postwar era, life drawing sessions invited new explorations of form and surface texture in the work of Saitō Kiyoshi, while Maekawa Senpan reclaimed the nude in a multi-series ode to Japan’s hot spring resorts. Finally, Kobayashi Donge reprised the femme fatale Salome as a symbol of female desire and agency during the rise of the postwar feminism movement.